AGI is here. No, not here on your mobile but here on the planet. AGI is Artificial General Intelligence. Sergey Brin of Google fame is working day and night to Beat the Brain. It’s a racing certainty that he has already done so. Anyway, whose brain is he trying to beat? Without meaning to be rude there are plenty of brains that were already beaten by the most primitive spell-check. So what is this apparently new step AI is taking that has something of the Trump Liberation Day about it? Simply, it is the ability to out-think human beings.
Trump does it by changing his mind, his ethos and his behaviour so that he is seen as unpredictable. Of course, now we know the routine, it is no longer so unpredictable.The results remain frighteningly chaotic but, as with a troublesome child, we can bottle it up and laugh all the way to the nuclear war. AGI does it methodically, which implies predictably, but hysterically fast. A human’s thinking is deductive. Fact A meets action B and our brain thinks C will happen.
Sometimes our brains work faster than our ability to express our thoughts. When you hear someone stammer be aware that one of the possible causes is a very quick mind. Our diction and our thinking are usually coordinated because our thinking is slow – as, for many issues, it should be. Today’s communications have gotten so fast that we frequently miss the point, miss the humour and, worst of all, miss the beauty of the world we live in.
In the speed versus heed race the worst accidents are misunderstanding.
The foot-in-the-door salesman often sells something not needed because his thinking is ahead of the victim. When predicting danger that is a big advantage. When predicting gullibility is a wicked con. The increasing number of scams on the internet are all down to faster thinking. So why are we making AGI increasingly faster thinking than ourselves? Because our dedication to competition has led us to believe that the winner comes first.
The sometimes illiterate farm workers I spent much of my childhood with didn’t come first in any human competitive sense. The wisdom they imparted to me is worth any passed exam, any accolade of success. My ability to love beautiful things, wonderful people and brilliant concepts is thanks to them. I bless them every night before I sleep and I wake to smile my everlasting thanks to their memory.
Humanity need not lose the indefinable wonder of life when AGI takes over all the runt work of existence. We do not have to become robots. Our brains can expand way beyond where they have reached so far. All we have to do is to learn to love life.
What will enable us to do that? Creativity, pure and simple.
We always have to be creative. We don’t even realize that we are being creative much of the time. ‘Studying creativity’ sounds like something for the inventor, sounds as though it requires a special background, training or intellect. Piffle, I say. Creativity is inherent in our mind just as running a marathon is inherent in our bodies. All we have to do is work at it. We do not need to create answers to Einstein. We do it by opening our mind as wide as we can open our eyes. The exercise itself is fun. The ensuing creativity is ours.
Welcome AGI. We know you will help us to become more creative.
Because we are human and you are a friendly bot.
We’re determined to remember that.
Good morning
John Bittleston
How is your creativity? Please tell us at [email protected].
There’s an unexpected prize for the best answer…
26 May 2025
